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Sympathy for the Devil

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An article in last week’s New York Times joins others in asking us to sympathize with the beleaguered transit industry, whose ridership has dropped every year since Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene. The article notes that Uber and Lyft subsidized the 5.6 billion rides they carried last year to the tune of $2.7 billion, or almost 50 cents a ride.

“The risks of [transit] privatization are grave,” the Times article warns. Uber and Lyft are taking “a privileged subset of passengers away from public transit systems” which “undermines support for public transportation.”

What the article doesn’t say is that, in order to carry 9.6 billion riders last year, public transit demanded more than $50 billion in subsidies from taxpayers, or more than $5 per ride. In other words, transit subsidies per rider are more than ten times greater than Uber and Lyft subsidies. Continue reading →

Closing the Gap

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China is building a magnetically levitated (maglev) train that will “fill the gap between high-speed rail and air transportation,” says CNN. This new train may have a top speed of 370 miles per hour, which “could narrow the gap between high-speed rail and air travel,” says Republic World.

What is this preoccupation with gaps? The only gap I see is between the ears of those who think maglev makes sense either in the United States or anywhere else in the world.

Here’s the gap: high-speed rail costs a lot more and goes a lot slower than flying. Maglev will cost even more and still go slower than flying. How does that fix the gap? Wake me up when someone comes up with a technology that costs less and goes faster than jet aircraft. Continue reading →

Saving the Planet by Flying

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The Guardian reported yesterday about people who think they are saving the planet by giving up flying and taking the train instead. They should think again, especially for those who are Americans.

According to the 2016 edition of the Transportation Energy Data Book, Amtrak in 2014 used an average of 2,186 British thermal units (BTUs) per passenger mile in 2014, while the airlines used 2,511. Jet fuel and Diesel fuel both have about the same BTUs and produce about the same greenhouse gases per gallon, so that would seem to give rail travel an edge.

But airplanes don’t have to go around mountains or follow meandering river valleys to get to their destinations. The Amtrak route from Portland to Washington DC is 3,035 miles long, while airlines only have to go 2,350 miles. Multiply through, and the Amtrak trip used 6.6 million BTUs while the airline flight used only 5.9 million. Continue reading →

More Good Money After Bad in New Mexico

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New Mexico’s Rail Runner has lost 38 percent of its riders since 2012 and is on course to making it 40 percent in 2019. Rio Metro, which operates the trains, is scrambling to find the $55 million it needs to install positive train control, as required by federal law, but remains $20 million short.

Abandoned station on the Rail Runner line. Click image for Wikipedia article. Photo by John Phelan.

A new report published by the state legislative finance committee offers a proposal in response to these problems: transit-oriented development. Although the report reveals that many of the communities along the rail line have zoned land for transit-oriented development, none has come about except in Santa Fe, and even there the development is minimal and required tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies. Continue reading →

150th Anniversary of a Boondoggle

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the pounding of the gold spike that represented completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Union Pacific, which now owns the complete route, plans to bring its newly restored Big Boy steam locomotive to Ogden to recreate, with 4-8-4 locomotive 844, the joining of the UP and Central Pacific in 1869. Numerous museums and history societies are planning exhibits and meetings.

While it would be fascinating to watch the Big Boy operate, you’ll have to pardon the Antiplanner for otherwise being unenthused about this event. As I see it, the first transcontinental railroad was the biggest boondoggle in nineteenth-century America, and one that — as later railroads proved — we could have lived without. Unfortunately, it is still being cited as an example of why twenty-first century America should do even more foolish things like build high-speed rail. Continue reading →

First Quarter Transit Ridership Down 2.6%

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Nationwide transit ridership in March 2019 was 1.6 percent below March 2018, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. For what it’s worth, March 2019 had one fewer work day than March 2018. However, ridership for the first three months of 2019 was down 2.6 percent, so this year is not looking good for the transit industry.

March ridership grew in just eleven of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas, and first quarter ridership grew in fifteen. The biggest losers for the quarter were Milwaukee (-12.7%), Detroit (-11.9%), and Louisville (-11.0%). The biggest winners were Richmond (+16.5%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (+8.1%), and Tampa (+5.7%). Houston grew but by only 1.4 percent. Ridership in Seattle declined by 2.2 percent for the month of March and 2.4 percent for the first quarter.
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The Antiplanner will have a more detailed analysis of these data in next Tuesday’s policy brief. In the meantime, my enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet can be downloaded by anyone wanting to look up their favorite transit agencies or urban areas. For information on how to use the spreadsheet, see the explanation with last month’s post, keeping in mind that the columns with the annual totals have been moved one to the right to make room for March, 2019 data.

Milwaukee Puts Ribbons Over Brooms

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Due to circumstances entirely within the city of Milwaukee’s control, it can’t afford to fix potholes in city streets and it certainly won’t pay to repair the damage to at least 45 cars caused by those potholes so far this year. The circumstances are that, instead of fixing streets, the city decided to blow $123 million on a 2.1-mile streetcar line.

The Milwaukee streetcar trundles through the city at an average speed of 7.4 miles per hour. Flickr photo by David Wilson.

Nor will it have money for fixing potholes in the future. That’s because the Democratic National Convention is going to be held in Milwaukee next summer, and the city plans to blow another $28 million building a 0.4-mile extension of the streetcar line beyond the convention center — a convention center, by the way, whose expansion is costing the city $247 million to $277 million. Continue reading →

Washington Transit Trips Up 90 Percent

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Bucking the national trend, Washington has managed to increase transit ridership by 90 percent in the first quarter of 2019 compared with the same quarter of 2018. It accomplished this by the simple expedient of offering the rides for free. Did I mention that this is Washington, Indiana?

Still, 90 percent sounds huge — but don’t get excited. For Washington, Indiana, increasing ridership by 90 percent meant going from 37 riders per day to 70. The city of Washington had about 12,000 residents in 2017 and Washington transit carried 10,353 rides — less than one per resident. Increasing ridership by 90 percent won’t even bring it up to two.

By offering free rides, “The city may be losing 75 cents per ride [which was the previous transit fare], but people will spend even more than that at area businesses,” claimed transit consultant Chuck Martindale. “It is something that is beneficial to the entire community.” Martindale offered no evidence that people getting free rides were spending more at area businesses before they got free rides, and he neglected to mention that, before offering free rides, Washington was losing nearly $10 per ride anyway. Continue reading →

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There . . .

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Even as California governor Gavin Newsome blames the state’s high-speed rail debacle on the consultants, President Trump and congressional Democrats have tenatively agreed to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure. Some have drawn the wrong lesson from California’s problems, suggesting that government should do everything itself, that privatization is wasteful, and government control is efficient.

In fact, it’s not the consultants, stupid! Nor is it the private sector in general, which has incentives to be efficient so long as it has to rely on market forces rather than a big-government sugar daddy. As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz points out, the real problem is the iron triangle of bureaucrats, elected officials, and private interests (including consultants, contractors, and unions) who benefit from big-government programs. All of them work together to get the programs approved and then have plausible deniability when things inevitably go wrong.

No one should have been surprised that the California project cost far more than originally projected. Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich predicted it months before voters went to the polls in 2008 (and even their high estimate of $61 billion — $71 billion in today’s dollars — turned out to be low). As the Antiplanner has shown, almost every passenger rail project built by government in the last half century has had a large cost overrun. Continue reading →

An Abundance of Caution

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Illinois contractors and unions are lobbying hard for a gas tax increase, claiming that highway infrastructure is crumbling and killing people. Last week, the Antiplanner told Illinois that its highway infrastructure is actually doing fine, but the infrastructure that was in trouble was rail transit. Increasing gas taxes to repair Chicago transit would unfairly take money from low-income downstate auto commuters to subsidize higher-income Chicago transit commuters.

The day after I returned from Chicago, two local commuters woke up to discover a bridge had shed some concrete that crushed their cars in the night. Does that mean the unions were right about crumbling highway infrastructure?

No, the concrete, it turns out, came from a Chicago Transit Authority Red Line elevated line. CTA didn’t even seem too concerned about it, finding no evidence of “larger deterioration issues.” However, a spokesperson said, “out of an abundance of caution crews are performing a complete inspection of the area.” Continue reading →